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What’s wrong with Olympic women’s hockey? Not much: Cox

There’s this endearing and adorable belief out there that every winter Olympic sport features intense serious competition from a half-dozen countries or more, as well as frequent long-shot gold medallists from nations with little or no history in a specific sport.

Adorable, but utterly mythical.

The reality is this. A small clutch of northern nations rule the Winter Games and within that group, there are sports dominated by specific countries. The Netherlands rules speed skating. The Germans can’t be beat in luge. The Russian pairs skaters win gold as a habit. The Austrians ski downhill really, really fast. North Americans are very good in hockey. And so forth.

Not surprisingly countries tend to assign much of their Olympic funds to the sports in which they do well and are well appreciated by their people.

The Dutch don’t spend millions to try and win gold in ice hockey. The South Koreans don’t make winning the Super-G a priority. Romania hasn’t decided to build a bobsled empire around the bronze it won in the sport back in ’68.

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Most Olympic sports are dominated by two, sometimes three countries, which makes the Games relatively predictable in a number of ways. Figure skating of course, takes this predictability to an entirely different level via corrupt judging but let’s steer clear of all that.

Which brings us to women’s hockey.

This is a sport, ladies and gentlemen, that is actually more like most Winter Olympic sports than unlike them. It’s dominated by two countries, the U.S. and Canada, and for any of the other competing nations to win anytime soon, it would take a second Miracle on Ice.

It’s very much like the men’s game used to be until fairly recently. The Soviets and Canadians used to completely and utterly dominate men’s Olympic hockey running up huge scores and hogging all the golds.

From 1920 through 1952, Canada won six golds with the other won by a British team made up of Canadian-trained players. From 1956 through 1992, a Soviet or Moscow-based team won eight of 10 gold medals.

So for the first 17 Winter Olympics, Canada or the USSR/Russia won the gold in hockey 14 times. If Canada or Russia wins in Sochi, those two countries combined will have won gold in 17 of the 23 Winter Olympics ever held.

There is no question women’s hockey is a young sport suffering from the absence of at least one other strong country. But in that regard it not only resembles most Olympic sports right now, it mirrors the men’s version of the sport until recent times.

The Swiss were a bit of a revelation knocking off the host Russians to get to the semis and their program seems to be on a bit of an upswing. That’s good news given that the Finns, Swedes and Russians seem to be stuck in neutral, with funding and participation levels in those countries still much lower than Canada and the U.S.

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It’s frustrating for those who want to see the women’s game progress, and utterly unfair to the Canadian and American women who have to constantly answer for the shortcomings of other countries in a way in which Norwegian cross-country skiers and Dutch speed skaters never have to.

You could argue of course that the dominance of Canada and the U.S. is killing the sport.

Then again you could argue it’s giving the sport a chance to succeed.

Last week the CBC reported that 5.6 million Canadians watched the U.S. and Canadian women play a meaningless preliminary game, a number that will be surpassed for the gold-medal game later this week.

Put in context, last fall’s Grey Cup game between Saskatchewan and Hamilton averaged 4.5 million viewers. The Winter Classic between the Leafs and Red Wings averaged 3.5 million with a peak of 5.3 million. The big shootout game between the American and Russian men meanwhile hit the scales at 4.1 million viewers.

Now these are all apples and oranges to some degree, coming at different times of day and over different forms of carriers.

But the U.S.-Canada game clearly shows there’s an appetite out there for Olympic women’s hockey, and that’s important you would think both for IOC decision makers and the women’s hockey federations of other countries.

This sport is growing, just not quite in the way some would like or at the pace some would like.

But the format change this year produced more competitive games and the gold-medal women’s hockey finale will be a massive draw.

So exactly what’s the problem here?

Answer: unless German lugers are being pressed to explain why they can’t be beat there isn’t one.

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